Touchy-Feely

Mayor Nick Guccione needs to pay more attention to the welfare of Wentzville than the welfare of special interest groups. His touchy-feely mode of operation is creating huge problems for our city and things will soon be out of control.

The $20 million dollar parks project has problems. First they unexpectedly hit rock trying to dig the pool for the splash station and now several other problems with the design have surfaced and it looks like the answer is going to be time and money. The question is not going to be the time, we know who will suffer for that — the citizens who expect deadlines to be met. More importantly, who is going to pay for the mistakes in the design and the many high-dollar change orders that are forth coming?

It is the opinion of this writer that the design company is responsible for errors and oversights but there's another problem. The city engineers looked over the design and must have approved the plans; where does that leave them and us? Does our city staff have the resources and expertise to review a design of this magnitude? A simple question that should be answered by our mayor since they work for him. If they do, why are there design change orders being presented by the designer? Did our city bite off more than they can chew? How many of these problems will relate to higher costs for the city and who is ultimately responsible? Mr. Mayor, rather than walking around in La-La land with your thumb in your mouth you need to get to the bottom of this very serious quandary. In case no one told you, you are responsible for the employees in the city; if they cost the taxpayers more than you told them, the buck stops with you!

Another subject I reported about was Mayor Guccione getting with the local NAACP inviting them to approach the Board of Aldermen to change one of our historic street names to Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd. It started out with wanting to change Kohrs Avenue and then, deciding that that street wasn't high-profile enough, it went to changing Pearce Blvd. The latest I heard was they have added the possibility of wanting to change Allen Street. Their justification for changing Allen Street is because the founder of Wentzville, Senator William M. Allen, was a slave holder. It wasn't uncommon for quite a few of our founding citizens to be slave holders simply because the town of Wentzville was a Confederate stronghold of sympathizers. This was the reason that during the Civil War, Union troops regularly raided the town and was the main cause for the Battle of Wentszville, the only recorded Civil War battle in St. Charles County.

Proponents to change the name of Allen Street to Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd. are essentially saying that the name change is not really to honor Dr, King as much as it seems to be a punitive action against our slave holding founder. Using that logic, since Wentzville was vastly Confederate, its name should be changed to Dr. Martin Luther Kingville. To deny William Allen is to deny the history of our city.

Citizens of Wentzville are rallying around saving the heritage of our city and preserving our historic street names. The Wentzville Rotary has already adopted a resolution to save our history and the Wentzville Community Historical Society is right behind them. Other groups in town will soon join in to petition our Board of Aldermen to keep our historic street names intact.

Mayor Guccione was quoted to say; "This matter has been blown out of proportion." Something tells me that it's just begun to get blown out of proportion. Mr. Mayor, you have poked your touchy-feely nose in a hornet's nest; I hope you get stung real bad!